[ardour-users] Additional ladspa plugins, A delay and reverb technique, sidechains and alsamodularsynth

[Neil Nelson]

There are additional ladspa plugins that can be easily added to ardour
from the Gentoo packages  by searching on 'ladspa'. Some of these are

blop
caps-plugins
vlevel

Paul Winkler in a post on 'Editing interview done with two recorders'
provided a very interesting link,
http://www.computermusic.co.uk/pdf/tutorials/sidechain.pdf, and the home
page http://www.computermusic.co.uk has several pdf articles on mixing
techniques. One of those at
http://www.computermusic.co.uk/pdf/tutorials/atomsphere.pdf writes about
using reverb and delays and this might be approximated (not knowing what
the plugins of the article actually sound like) using the following.

Patch an instrument or vocal track to a bus. I sometimes have a Gate
(noise) and often a Dyson Compressor as the first two plugins and then
use the Tap Reverberator and select Ambience for Reverb Type. The output
of this bus is sent to the Master bus and two 'Delay' buses. I mark the
two Delay buses as left and right delay and pan them left and right. The
delay buses are sent to the Master bus. The delay used for both is Echo
Delay Line (maxmimum delay 0.1s). This is a CMT plugin (ladspa-cmt at
gentoo.org). The delay time is set to around .06 secs and the dry/wet
balance to around .9. The delay faders are set down to give a more
subliminal effect. All plugins are pre-fader. The delays tend to open up
the sound.

Sidechaining would seem to require a control voltage derived from a
signal amplitude detector that would be fed to a voltage controlled
amplifier. Ardour does not sppear to be designed to route control
voltages, whereas Alsamodularsynth (a Jack capable digital Moog
synthesizer, 'ams' at gentoo.org, search using 'alsa') routes signals
and control voltages very well. All the Alsa plugins available to Ardour
are also available to Alsamodularsynth. Although a signal amplitude
detector is a key part of many existing plugins and seen readily in
Ardour's VU meters, I am not finding a separate plugin/module that will
take a signal and output a voltage based on signal volume.

Neil
MPHMedia